Nothing sums up the excess of Christmas quite like the Christmas plum pudding.
So you’ve just eaten quite possibly the lushest, longest meal of the year, then, of course, you have to put a full stop to all that with a slab of Christmas pudding marooned in it’s own lake of brandy custard, or cream, or ice cream, or all three.
The Christmas pudding is a living dinosaur as it is quite possibly the only recipe still in regular use from the 17th century. That’s a hell of an achievement, but considering other delicacies of the time included roasted hedgehog and badger ham perhaps not surprising.
But what makes a Christmas pudding a Christmas pudding?
Spice girls
Traditionally, Christmas pudding is meant to have 13 ingredients symbolising Christ and the 12 Apostles, but the heavy-handed list of spices and booze probably has more do to with the primitive food preservation methods of the time than honouring the Last Supper’s guest list.
Early forebears of the pudding also contained meat as cooks at the time were very keen on mixing sweet and savoury. Sort of like apricot chicken for every meal. Indeed another Christmas staple, mince pies, were in fact originally mostly minced meat.
The only remnant of plum pudding’s meaty history is suet – the hard fat from around animal kidneys just in case you thought it sounded like it was something nicer – but even that seems to be fading out of popularity as an ingredient. Some recipes call for grated suet and it’s hard not to recognise modern sensibilities simply aren’t up to that.
Its cooking style has also contributed to its enduring popularity.
Cakes are generally cooked in an oven – something only the wealthy could afford back in the day – but Christmas pudding is boiled, a method pretty much anyone could do.
Thankfully, we have moved on from boiling it in a sheep’s stomach, making it more of a haggis, a development also undoubtedly advancing its long popularity.
Heavy metal
Another tradition largely gone is studding the pudding with silver coins.
Getting a coin in your slice is meant to give you good luck for the rest of the year but unfortunately as the silver level in coins dropped it made them unsafe to cook.
Nature abhors a vacuum, however, so now you can buy silver coins and charms specially for puddings. The low-fi version is to poke whatever coins in after the the pudding has been cooked.
And about its other name – plum pudding – because, of course, there are no actual plums in plum pudding. In fact, ‘plums’ was a generic word used for dried fruit and raisins because the English never like to make it easy on you.
Do you like plum pudding? What do you like to serve it with? We’d love to hear your opinion in the comments section below?
Also read: It’s beginning to look a lot like burnout. How to take care of yourself before the holidays start
